Patience of England's Ian Bell and Joe Root cheers Graham Gooch

England's Joe Root is hugged by Ian Bell after the Yorkshireman brought up his century during the second Ashes Test at Lord's. Photograph: Philip Brown/Reuters

Graham Gooch endured more than enough pain from Australia over the two decades leading up to 2005, initially as a player and then merely as a proud English cricket man, to appreciate the historical significance of administering such a comprehensive defeat at Lord's to take a 2-0 Ashes lead and maintain the possibility of a whitewash unprecedented in a five-Test series. But as England's batting coach, and a self-confessed traditionalist, he took most pleasure from the patience and discipline with which Ian Bell and Joe Root compiled their centuries.

Bell is comfortably the leading run-scorer in the series, with an aggregate of 317 crafted from match-shaping centuries at both Trent Bridgeand Lord's, and has batted a total of 938 minutes (more than 15 hours) and faced 644 balls. That is more time and balls faced than Australia's whole top six lasted in both innings combined at Lord's.

Add Root's 221 runs, the majority in a single innings, and the England pair have exactly matched the aggregate of Australia's top six for the two Tests combined – 538, in their case at an average of just over 23, whereas Bell and Root average more than 67 between them.

"Test cricket is a hell of a long game, five times 90 overs," Gooch said. "So it's about skills in batting, it's about run-making, it's about the whole package of not only having the technical skills but having the attitude, the mental toughness, the discipline, the concentration. You can't score runs unless you concentrate. Anyone can concentrate for 15 minutes [the average length of an innings for Australia's top six so far in the series is less than 29 minutes, whereas Bell's is almost four hours]. But to score a Test hundred you need to concentrate for a long period of time."

Gooch was asked by an Australian whether it is increasingly difficult to develop that ability to concentrate for batsmen who spend much of the year playing Twenty20 cricket, whether in the Indian Premier League or the Big Bash.

"Those skills I think worldwide are being chipped away at the edges by the amount of one-day and Twenty20 cricket," he said. "There's lots of different competitions. If you're a traditionalist and still think Test cricket is the benchmark, you can see with the number of competitions that are popping up and the rewards that are available, the possibility of them chipping away at the traditional game – and that's the same for every country. So you've got to work hard to try to keep your players on track and try to educate them as well as you can on the mental skills that are necessary to bat long. It is a different kind of skill."

Bell has had plenty of time to develop those skills and rarely plays T20 cricket these days. But Root is a phenomenon. Only 22, he has established himself as a key figure in England's team in all three forms of the game – aided by his athleticism in the field and the handy off-spinning ability that has brought him three wickets for 15 from nine overs in this Ashes series. Yet he retains, on the evidence of Lord's and the even bigger innings he played for Yorkshire and the Lions earlier in the season, the ability to grind on.

Gooch is reluctant to go overboard in his praise but is clearly a big fan. "From the first time we saw him in India he was an impressive young character," he said of a Yorkshire scamp who had just turned four when Gooch played his last Test in February 1995, a 329-run drubbing in Perth with which Australia completed a 3-1 Ashes series win – the fourth of their eight triumphs in succession.

"So I'm not surprised at all that he's moving forward with his skill levels, the way he works at his game and all the disciplines that are in place. It's early days but I have nothing to suggest to me that Joe won't continue to be a successful player in international cricket. A lot of things can come along and test you so we'll wait and see. The jury's out on that but at the moment he's going in the right direction.

"He's not a complete player – nobody's a complete player. He's a young player with great promise and great skill and anyone who sees him play would think that he's going to have a fruitful career. But you can't be sure."

He sees similarities with the young Alastair Cook, whom he first encountered at Essex. "Alastair Cook had a similar mentality when he was Joe's age. He was mature in the mind, he knew exactly how he could score runs and I think anyone who saw Joe in the winter saw that too. He walked straight in and you'd have thought he'd been playing that sort of game the whole time. He has a confidence about him."

Gooch highlighted "one little snapshot" at Lord's that most impressed him about Root – his second–innings dismissal, caught at third man aiming for an outrageous reverse ramp when 20 short of his double century.

"Australia quite rightly knew we'd like him to get a double hundred and that would suit our 600 target as well so they put everyone back on the boundary," he said. "So what does the lad do? He goes for the one shot where they haven't got a fielder. That tells you a lot about Joe. He's not selfish. He's not going to be out there for 18 overs to get his 200, he knows he has to get his runs reasonably. That gives you a little insight into his thought process."

If there were any lingering doubts, Lord's provided confirmation that English cricket has a new star.